You’re Not Crazy, Your Pet Can Feel the Groove Too!
So picture this. You’re in the club and the music is loud. You can feel the beat pulsing through you so strongly that you wonder how the speakers haven’t already blown out. What are you going to do? Just stand in the corner and watch? For some of you, fine, maybe that’s the case. But for others, you would obviously be dancing! I know I’m in the latter group for sure.
In fact, dancing is shown to have a lot of benefits for us, which is why many of you might have said that you would do it if you felt the beat in a club. Dancing may prevent the risk of disability in old age, cause you to have better cognitive functioning, reduce anxiety levels, and even help the white matter in your brain, let alone give you a wicked cardio-induced endorphin rush. And those benefits, such as the endorphin rush aren’t just exclusive to humans. It seems like other forms of cardio, like running, give dogs the same benefits! Dance is also often a social activity and even connects some to their cultural roots by exposing people to the traditions of their ethnic origin.
Dancing is frequently used in moments of celebration, and we see dance being used to celebrate major moments in people’s most important moments. Ray Lewis, as well as many other sports icons, use dancing to excite themselves and their spectators before a game. They also often use dance to celebrate victories within a game, such as scoring a touchdown. Even just watching Michael Jackson do iconic moves such as his signature spin or the moonwalk makes you want to learn and imitate the moves for their visual appeal. We see dance sequences taking place in some of the most memorable movies in pop culture, and they often in romantic comedies have some kind of association with “getting the guy”.
So clearly dancing has many benefits for us as we navigate through the world. But if dancing can make us physically better and might even gain us social connections, both romantic and platonic, why don’t we better understand how they can help other beings that we love, such as our household pets? Have you ever wondered why you might be more inclined to dance than your household pets?
Now hold on, take a step back. I’m not saying that every animal is capable of dancing at the club like we are. Or even that every animal will bop to Beyonce when you’re playing Single Ladies at full volume. Researchers from The Neuroscience Institute wanted to find out if it is possible for animals to dance as we understand it. These researchers basically defined dancing among humans as spontaneous movements with the use of varying movements and body parts. You would think that evolutionarily, monkeys might dance in a similar way that we do. Or maybe you’ve just watched The Jungle Book on Disney+ one too many times.
Maybe, as they say in The Jungle Book, they “wanna be like [us]”. But in fact, it seems like monkeys don’t dance as we do. Parrots, as opposed to monkeys, are really rather good at these musical cues and it appears that they experience dancing in a closer manner than most other animals by being able to bob their head and move their feet to the beat of the music.
The bird here looks so happy to be listening to someone sing Elvis that it feels plausible it is due to the music itself. But can we really be sure that the emotions are tied to Elvis as the title of the video really says? What if the bird just really loves hearing the owner sing or gets intense pleasure from the sound of the guitar?
We can’t get parrots to tell us explicitly what makes them move, or dance, as it seems. So in order to investigate this, what these researchers wanted to know was whether parrots listening to music move instinctually and automatically, or if their forebrain contributes to their conscious decision to move to the music.
It’s confusing to think about why a type of bird might be closer to us in an ability to move than an animal that we as humans evolved from, but researchers think that this might be the case because both humans and birds typically learn as we develop by connecting sounds and movements in our minds.
It’s funny to think about the fact that this whole study came about because one of the researcher’s pets, a parrot named Snowball, was used in a previous study and began to move in ways that the researchers weren’t expecting. They decided to film his movements to songs that Snowball had never heard before: Another One Bites the Dust and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. I don’t know about you, but I think this would have been a fun study to participate in if I were Snowball — those are great songs to dance to!
The researchers found out a few things:
1. Snowball seemed more interested in exploring new movement capabilities than dancing in a manner that was synchronized to a beat, as opposed to humans that typically favor a beat
2. Snowball’s dance movements came in short bursts rather than in a continuous stream of dancing movements throughout the songs
3. Snowball’s movements were not aligned with a specific part of any song, which they figured out by playing each song three times and making sure that similar movements weren’t a pattern at specific parts of a song
Snowball was the only parrot studied in this article, so I don’t think we can take much from this. After all, it’s not possible to represent a whole population, even if it isn’t humans, based on just one individual. This brings the procedures of this study into question. The researchers try to legitimize the findings more by providing links to other dancing parrots, but can we really connect these unless those parrots go through the same stimuli under the same conditions? Some speculation that the researchers had for why Snowball might dance to the beat included a desire for creative movements and a desire to bond socially with their owner. However, it was ensured that Snowball never danced to receive food or to mate, so it was likely not connected to these things for this particular parrot.
The researchers think that parrots and humans have certain traits in common that might lend to the understanding of these “spontaneous movements” that we call dance:
1. We learn developmentally in similar ways, by using vocal learning techniques
2. Both humans and parrots can imitate using nonverbal movement
3. Both humans and parrots can create long-lasting interpersonal relationships
4. We can both learn complex physical movement patterns
5. We both use movement to communicate and therefore attend to what may look like physical communication from those around us
There are many benefits of dancing for humans, as mentioned before, such as physical and mental health, celebration, mating, and friendship development. Clearly a lot more needs to be done for us to really understand if parrots, or maybe even other animals, can actually dance as we know it and reap these same rewards. But Snowball’s movements may help us to realize that animals are curious about diversity in their ability to move. Next time you’re home, play some Queen for your own pet and see what happens!
